Thursday, August 09, 2012

Austin film maker, Richard Linklater, called his breakout film, "Slacker" (1990). It is no coincidence that this blogger has taken up residence in Austin, TX. If this blog represents a (fair & balanced) avoidance of work or responsibility, so be it.

Whenever I take the freeway west from Toronto to my parents’ house, I pass a park where I ran a cross-country race many years ago. It was the county championships. I had just turned thirteen, and had been a “serious” runner for no more than six weeks, which meant that I knew almost nothing at all about running, except that you were supposed to run as hard as you could for as long as you could. My coach told me to stay close to the front, and I took the instruction literally, the way that dutiful thirteen-year-olds do. So I attached myself to the best runner in the field—a fifteen-year-old named Lloyd Schmidt—and did not let go.

The race began by winding along a series of trails and roads on the fringes of the park. It was a warm autumn afternoon. I remember the illicit thrill of running with the leaders, where I knew I did not belong. My lungs and my legs gradually slipped out of synch. I fell first half a breath short, then a full breath short. The world around me grew hazy. We came to a steep hill. My coach was standing there. “Now,” he said. I willed myself to pass Schmidt, accelerating off the top of the hill. That’s the part of the course that I see from the highway every time I drive by, and it never fails to send my stomach sideways. The next thing I remember was Lloyd Schmidt holding me up at the finish. I remember lying on the ground, slowly bringing my knees up to my chest. I remember the panic of not being able to get enough air into my lungs. I had done what everyone always says you are supposed to do as a human being. I had given it my all. And I realized that what everyone says you should always do was so painful that I never wanted to do it again.

For the first half of the nineteen-eighties, the greatest distance runner in the world was Alberto Salazar. He grew up in a Boston suburb and ran for the University of Oregon. Distance runners tend to be elfin. Salazar was tall. Great distance runners are graceful: they float, landing lightly on their toes and snapping their calves back so that their heels almost touch the tops of their hamstrings. Salazar shuffled like an old man. His college coach said that he looked as if he were sitting down and running at the same time. His college teammate Rudy Chapa was biomechanically perfect: if you saw the two of them running side by side on the track, you would assume that Chapa was the champion and Salazar the journeyman. But it was Salazar who won the New York City Marathon three consecutive times, and who in 1982 had one of the finest seasons of any distance runner before or since.

Salazar’s greatness lay in his desire. In his absorbing [2012] memoir, 14 Minutes (written with John Brant), Salazar writes of lying in bed as a teen-ager with strep throat, on a bitterly cold winter day. When it was time for his daily run, he crawled out a second-floor window, knowing that his mother would never let him out of the house:

I turned and started running down the snowy streets, into the bitter wind, ignoring my pain and fever and weakness, stuffing them down into the hole in my psyche where I deposited all negative thoughts—along with all negative facts—detracting from my running. During my workout, it started to snow, and when I arrived back home an hour later, my cap and sweat suit were caked. Icicles hung from my nose, and I shivered uncontrollably. Any further subterfuge was inconceivable; in my condition, there was no way I could climb back on the roof.

In 1978, Salazar, then nineteen, ran the seven-mile Falmouth Road Race, on Cape Cod, one of the premier road races in the world. It was a warm, muggy summer day. At the four-mile mark, Salazar suggested to Bill Rodgers—at the time the best marathoner in the world—that he, Salazar, “take over for a while,” meaning do the work of fighting the wind coming off the Atlantic.

“That’s the last thing I remember about that race,” Salazar writes. He was “drifting, confused.” The world “was fuzzy and had dim patches.” But he kept at it. Someone later told him that he “came to a dead stop, turned slowly around in a circle, and then resumed running.” And then resumed running. He goes on:

The next thing I remember is hearing a voice calling out numbers “104 . . . 106 . . . 107. . . it’s not going down! I think we’re going to lose him!” I realized that I was no longer running. For some reason, I was lying down in the medical tent. . . . The doctors had stopped calling out my temperature readings. I heard scraps of conversations: “brain damage.” . . . “He may die.”

Four years of spectacular athletic achievement followed. Then, in 1994, after an absence of almost a decade, Salazar returned to competitive running, to compete in the Comrades ultramarathon, in South Africa. Comrades is absurdly difficult—a race that winds fifty-six miles between Durban and Pietermaritzburg, through searing heat and a series of brutal hills. Salazar had never run an ultramarathon. He trained in the cool of Portland, not the swelter of southern Africa. He decided that he wanted to average a six-minute-and-fifteen-second mile. To put that number in perspective, Salazar intended to run at a pace that would put him in the top one per cent of male finishers in this year’s Boston Marathon, then maintain that pace for thirty more miles—and do so over unfamiliar terrain, in temperatures that climbed into the eighties, and with limited access to food and water. He won, of course. His only concern came at the very end of the race, when the course rounded a series of sharp corners on its way toward the Pietermaritzburg rugby stadium:

Negotiating these turns required every ounce of my attention, because my balance was precarious. I could not allow myself to fall; I was quite sure I wouldn’t be able to stand back up. I feared falling down more than losing.

I did not fall. Somehow, I stayed upright, keeping the pace I had established a lifetime ago during the dark, cool miles leaving Durban. I crossed the line and did not so much collapse as disintegrate.

It doesn’t take a runner to appreciate how strange and remarkable this is. For most of us, slack—the gap between what is possible, under conditions of absolute effort, and actual performance—is unavoidable. We all want to try our hardest, every time. But we can’t. Tyler Cowen, the author of An Economist Gets Lunch (2012), argued recently that, out of the dozens of restaurants in Washington, DC., that aspire to be first class, only five to ten really are at any given time. A restaurant can be great for its first three to six months—as the chefs and the owners strive to make the best possible impression on diners and reviewers. But, “once these places become popular, their obsession with quality slacks off,” Cowen writes. “They become socializing scenes. . . . Their audiences become automatic.”

The political economist Albert O. Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) begins with the same premise. Hirschman was interested in the way consumers cope with the decline of institutions—comparing the strategy of “exit” (if your local public school is lousy, you send your child to a private school) with that of “voice” (if your local public school is lousy, you show up at school-board meetings and complain). Classical economists and libertarians, he observes, understand exit but are contemptuous of voice. Politics, by contrast, is overwhelmingly (sometimes to its detriment) focussed on voice, and regards exit as akin to “desertion, defection and treason.” The book is one of the masterpieces of contemporary political thought. But Hirschman, like Cowen, spends little time saying why there’s a gap between how good institutions are and how good they could be. The book, as he writes in the opening chapter,

assumes not only that slack has somehow come into the world and exists in given amounts, but that it is continuously being generated as a result of some sort of entropy characteristic of human, surplus-producing societies. “There’s a slacker born every minute” could be its motto. Firms and other organizations are conceived to be permanently and randomly subject to decline and decay, that is, to a gradual loss of rationality, efficiency, and surplus-producing energy, no matter how well the institutional framework within which they function is designed.

This notion of slack is part of what we take as normal and natural about the world. Of the last generation of great Washington restaurants, Cowen writes, “The Source, Zengo, Sei, Palena, Oyamel, Hook, Equinox and Central Michel Richard . . . all had their moments of glory.” Peaking at the moment, he says, are Little Serow, Rasika West, and Mintwood Place. A dedicated foodie like him, who thrives on the innovation and novelty of the restaurant scene, needs the Source, Zengo, and Sei to stop trying so hard, in order to give Little Serow, Rasika West, and Mintwood Place a chance to shine. Social and economic mobility, in any system, is essentially slack arbitrage: hard work is a successful strategy for those at the bottom because those at the top no longer work so hard. By custom, we disparage the idleness of the idle rich. We should encourage it. It is our best chance of taking their place.

I slacked off after that traumatic race in the county championships. How could I not? The memory of what absolute effort meant loomed over every subsequent performance. In my second year of running, I was in the lead group at the provincial cross-country championships with a mile to go, and faded to forty-fifth—not because I was tired but because I knew precisely what trying to win would take. The next year, in the same championships, I was running third and faded to thirty-fifth, because there was a hill near the end and I remembered how a hill near the end would feel, and I could come up with no reason that I—a healthy and normal teen-ager from a well-adjusted family—should have to go through that kind of pain again. By the end of high school, I was finished as a competitive runner: my fear of the experience grew too overwhelming. Salazar faced the same fear and drew the opposite conclusion.

At Falmouth, Salazar rose, like Lazarus, and decided that the race had been a miracle. “I felt exhilarated, and not merely by the fact that I’d narrowly escaped a brush with death,” he writes, and goes on:

My thrill ran deeper; I had learned something from death. I had learned, through the agency of my lifelong prayer, that I wasn’t afraid of death. I realized that this made me different from the people walking by me in the street. More important—at least to me in the midst of my obsession—it made me different from other runners. I no longer doubted my toughness.

Alberto Salazar’s father, Jose, was a member of Cuba’s pre-revolutionary middle class. He met Fidel Castro when Castro was in law school and he was an engineering student at the University of Havana. Once, when government agents came looking for Castro, Jose hid him in his office in the student-union building. “I don’t care about Castro,” the guard at the building’s entrance reportedly told the government agents. “But Jose Salazar is President of the Engineering Students’ Department, and I cannot let you pass.”

After the revolution, Jose designed dozens of projects for the fledgling regime, and was stunned when his plans for a church were rejected. “There is no room for God in the revolution,” Che Guevara wrote, in response to the plans. Jose appealed to Castro. Castro backed Che. In October of 1960, when Alberto was a toddler, Jose denounced Castro in an open letter and then, as Castro’s agents came to arrest him, escaped to Miami. Shortly thereafter, Jose left for six months to train in the Florida Everglades for the abortive Bay of Pigs invasion. Salazar describes his father as a man of absolutes: loyalty was paramount, betrayal unforgivable, and the Catholic Church inviolate. He would come to Salazar’s races, when Alberto was a boy, and scream from the sidelines, “A Salazar never quits.”

14 Minutes is reminiscent, at times, of Andre Agassi’s brilliant memoir, Open (2009), in which he, too, locates the source of his development in a driven and angry immigrant father. But “Open” is a story of rebellion: Agassi wrestles throughout with his discomfort and shame over who he is and where he came from. Salazar, on the contrary, accepts that athletic prowess may have its roots in the psychological extremity of his family life, and dedicates his book to his father. He shares his father’s commitment to Catholicism. He understands that there are heroic possibilities to sanctifying grace. At the midpoint of the Comrades ultramarathon, as his body moved into crisis, Salazar began to recite the mysteries of the Rosary: the Annunciation, the glorification, the sorrow. “Lord, there is no way for me to do this unless you want me to,” he prayed. “It’s in your hands.” At Falmouth, as he lay near death in a bath of ice water, his father stood over him. “He had found two wooden sticks, tongue depressors,” Salazar writes. “He crossed the sticks over me in the shape of a crucifix. ‘Concentrate on this, Alberto,’ my father said. ‘Just focus on this, and you’ll be okay.’ ”

I went to see Salazar this summer, in Utah, where he was leading the group of Nike Team runners he coaches through several weeks of high-altitude training. He is slightly stooped, with close-cropped hair, an unlined face, and a gracious and gentle manner. He had visited his father a few weeks earlier. They had argued, as they often did. Salazar had gone to his niece’s and his nephew’s weddings, and his father reprimanded him, because neither married within the Church. “In the end, he didn’t let me stay at his house,” Salazar said, with a mixture of resignation and affection. “I just went and visited my sister.”

Between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four, he said, he ran an average of a hundred and five miles a week—through snowstorms and heat waves, illnesses and injuries. In those seven years, he missed just eleven days of running. He was frank about the toll it took. “I pushed,” he said. “I never thought you could ruin your career by doing this. I remember thinking, Well, I’ve been doing this for years. Now I have a world record, so I’m just going to keep going. In hindsight, it was foolishness.” Élite distance runners typically maintain their form into their early thirties. Salazar was all but finished by his mid-twenties. He struggled with asthma. His body broke down.

Salazar could have had a longer career had he pushed himself less. But what kind of career would that have been? It was obviously a question that he had thought about a lot in the intervening years. A moderate Salazar never would have come so close to death at Falmouth. But it was the miracle of Falmouth that freed Salazar to run with such abandon. (“I no longer doubted my toughness.”) A moderate Salazar might have run happily and successfully into his thirties. But a moderate Salazar might never have won the New York City Marathon three times. “The pain of running is like the pain of drowning,” he went on. “A kind of weariness sets in and you lose the will to fight. What I could do is simply push myself through that exhaustion.”

The “could” in that sentence, though, is not quite right. Salazar should have said that he had to push himself through that exhaustion. He had no other option. That’s also what he would have told me on that day, long ago, when I lay in agony on the ground. He would have said that the pain was necessary. There was no other way for someone like me to beat Lloyd Schmidt. We pretend that meritocracies—our favored word for modern competitions—are contests of equals. They aren’t. Some people can stay close only by making painful choices, and, as the standards of competition rise, those choices grow more painful still. There was a candle on the table where Salazar was sitting, and he held his hand over the flame for a moment. “I feel that as much as anyone else,” he said.

Salazar now coaches some of America’s top distance runners, and he had spent that day in Utah working with Matt Centrowitz, who, at the age of twenty-one, astonished the track world last year by finishing third in the fifteen hundred metres in the world championships. Centrowitz was recovering from a minor knee injury. It hurt only when he ran slowly, so he was doing alternating repetitions of two-hundred-metre and one-hundred-metre sprints. Centrowitz is sleek and olive-skinned, and as playful and uninhibited as a teen-ager. When he ran, his face was utterly composed, his back straight, his hips forward, his upper body so relaxed that it looked as if he would fall over if you gave him a push. As he ran by, he barely made any noise: if you closed your eyes, all you would hear was the light, rhythmic tapping of the balls of his feet.

Centrowitz had done a rigorous workout that morning, and spent several hard hours in the gym that afternoon. Now he was gliding around the track, effortlessly peeling off one sprint after another. “How does your knee feel?” Salazar asked him, after each repetition. The answer was always “Fine.” Centrowitz was the anti-Salazar—graceful where Salazar was labored, restrained where Salazar pressed, attentive to his coach where Salazar went his own way. That is the luxury of talent. We should all be so blessed. We aren’t. Deep into the workout, Centrowitz turned it up just a little, so that if you looked very closely at his face you could see the slightest hint of strain. Salazar looked down at his stopwatch. “Don’t run any faster,” he said.

Early in the summer of 2007, Salazar began feeling a pain in his neck. At home one afternoon, he came close to blacking out on his way to the bathroom. He thought that he had the flu. He went to the doctor, who could find nothing wrong. The next day was a Saturday. Usually, he would have gone for a run that morning, in the hills around his house. But he woke up too late. He went to the Nike campus. As he walked across one of the playing fields, the pain in his neck came back, sharper than before. “I sank to one knee,” Salazar writes. “There was time neither to feel fear nor to know peace. The world went black.” He was having a heart attack.

Three of his young runners were walking with him. They sprinted for help and called 911. Salazar’s face turned purple. He had no pulse. Blood trickled out of his mouth. An emergency-room physician, Doug Douglass, and a National Guard medic, Louis Barahona, happened to be standing by the sidelines. The two began CPR. Salazar had now been down for six minutes. They kept going. Nothing happened. At ten minutes, the ambulance arrived. The medics gave him a shock with a defibrillator. Nothing. The shocks were timed at one-minute intervals. At eleven minutes, they tried again. Nothing. Twelve minutes. Nothing. Finally, his heart fluttered back to life. His brain had been without oxygen, he says, for fourteen minutes. “None of the doctors who treated me, and none of the experts I’ve consulted since the day I collapsed, have ever heard of anybody being gone for that long and coming back to full health,” he writes. He was back on the track, coaching again, nine days later. Ω

[Malcolm Gladwell is a British-born Canadian journalist, author, and pop sociologist. He has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. He is best known as the author of The Tipping Point (2000), Blink (2005), and Outliers (2008). Most recently, he has written What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (2009). Gladwell graduated with a degree in history from the University of Toronto's Trinity College in 1984.]

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About Me

Born on a dark and stormy night in early 1941. I've lived a life of trial and error for more than 3 score and 10 years. It's been like hitting myself in the head with a hammer; it will feel so good when I can stop.